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Attacks on liberal film stars are hilariously wrong-headed. But that doesn't stop them. John Patterson on mudslinging in Tinseltown

Friday July 25, 2003The Guardian

Every time I turn on my TV, it seems, I don't have to listen long before another empurpled, fulminating, rightwing blowhard starts pontificating about all the damage that "the liberal media" is doing to our airwaves, to our children's future, to our morals, to the institution of heterosexual marriage, to our once-proud schools, to our precious bodily fluids and to our national ability to achieve and sustain workable hard-ons.

Now, I get 300 channels on my telly, and I clock between 10 and 20 hours most weeks, but I cannot find this liberal cabal's supposedly ubiquitous, evil spoor anywhere, and it's mainly because there are so many rightwing arseholes on TV blocking my view. To hear the Bush-munchers tell it, TV and movies are chocker with advertisements for the feminist "agenda" and the homosexual "lifestyle", with exhortations to immolate, then urinate on Old Glory, with slanders against the military and the Pentagon, with slurs against our great Commander-in-Chief and those who do his wrathful bidding, and with secular-humanist plots aimed at defaming the name of the Creator.

My God, if only. You'd think the Republicans might give their gums a rest now that they have a ferociously rightwing president, and now that his ditto-heads control Congress. Or now that the cable news networks are all trimming to the right in the hope of catching up with Fox, and now that the publishing industry has discovered that some on the right can actually read books, not just burn them. But no, they still have leftie scalps to collect, and their happiest hunting ground is Hollywood. The recent conflict - the one I call Dubya Dubya Two - showed us how much mileage the righties know they can get out of persecuting the lefties of the movie industry.

These days terms like "Traitor!" and "Appeaser!" are the first rightwing insults to get hurled, whereas they used to be the slurs of last resort. And mainly they got hurled at anyone from Hollywood who dared to suggest that Bush-Cheney-Rummy-Wolfie might be a bunch of oil-lubricated oligarchs with the basest of motives for stampeding us to war. That the revelations of recent weeks might suddenly prove them right is of no consequence to the renta-gobs: these traitors are from Hollywood - there's nothing good they can say or do. Ever.

This tune is played out relentlessly in a shallow book called Tales from the Left Coast: True Stories of Hollywood Stars and Their Outrageous Politics, by Michael Hirsen. Hirsen, who's whiter than Strom Thurmond, claims he used to be a touring keyboard player for the Temptations back in the 1970s. These days he teaches at some Christian degree-mill on radio, TV and Hollywood, a triad he appears to loathe. He also shows up on such right-leaning slagfests as The O'Reilly Factor (chaired by fightin' Bill O'Reilly, spiritual descendant of such fine Irish-American Catholics as Senator Joseph McCarthy and Jew-baiting 1930s radio-priest Father Coughlin) and has an anti-Hollywood website from which most of the anecdotes in his book were filched.

His book has one great scoop for us, and here it is: "Hollywood is packed with liberals!" As breaking stories go this one's right up there with "Langley, Virginia, is a nest of espionage agents!" or "Nashville is full of Republicans! And steel guitars!" Hirsen, however, seems to think he's uncovered another McCarthy-esque "conspiracy so immense..." and that we should all sleep with rifles under our beds in case Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon knock on the door in the wee small hours. Left Coast is a numbing reiteration of every rightwing bromide about the depravity and venality of anyone in Hollywood who disagrees with Michael Hirsen. Thus we get to hear again how dangerous to our national wellbeing are such pipsqueaks as Mike Farrell and Martin Sheen (The West Wing is, natch, an affront to democracy and the GOP), Sean Penn, Robert Redford, Julia Roberts, Spike Lee, Kevin Costner (who gave large donations to Bush, Sr), Chevy Chase, George Clooney, Jack Nicholson, Oliver Stone, Ted Danson, Cybill Shepherd, Kathleen Turner and the hydra-headed Barbra Streisand.

All of these people are either full of shit, hilariously wrong-headed, downright dangerous or in league with Fidel Castro and Osama bin Laden. Hirsen's Hollywood history is a parallel universe with about as much grounding in reality as Melrose Place. On the blacklist (and note the incandescent prose): "The idea that folks in Hollywood could be 'persecuted' for left-leaning rhetoric is so absurd it sends most people into a laughing fit." Those artists who were forced out of jobs and often into exile for 20 years "for their left-leaning rhetoric" might choose to disagree. So might the late John Garfield, hounded to his grave at 38 by the very witch-hunters Hirsen so cravenly venerates.

And Hirsen just loves Elia Kazan, as you'd expect. On The Graduate: "the film introduced promiscuity, incest and serial adultery" (incest?). On Oliver Stone in Cuba: "Attempting to show the softer side of Fidel Castro is like showing the softer side of Jeffrey Dahmer."

And so on. The witchhunts were A-OK, even though they never happened; the Fondas, Henry and Ted Turner included, were all evil dupes; Seven Days in May is mean to upstanding American fascists, Dr Strangelove is horrid to the military-industrial complex; and Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger's work for Peta (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) makes them formidable and deeply dangerous. The whole book falls in lockstep with the rebarbitive Gingrich worldview, and no nuance or doubt will interfere with Hirsen's mania, or his rotten jokes about hot tubs, gurus, plastic surgery and liberal guilt.

In the entire book, I can't find the name of a single movie he admires. Not one. Not even Forrest Gump or Left Behind. Nor can I find the names of more than 10 Hollywood rightwingers, which Hirsen seems to think bolsters his premise that they're all afraid to pipe up lest they go on some leftie Redlist.

This is just pathetic research on Hirsen's part. Anyone who can't dredge up the names of rightwingers in movies and TV is blinded only by the fact that his head is up his arse. He namechecks Bo Derek, Mel Gibson ("a faith-filled individual"), libertarian Kurt Russell, "legendary model and actress Jennifer O'Neill" (so legendary she hasn't been seen anywhere since Summer of '42 - except among the blurbs on the back cover of Hirsen's screed), director Lionel Chetwynd, the dependably gaga Charlton Heston, and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Where are Robert Duvall, Randy Quaid, Kelsey Grammer, James Woods on his bad days, superpatriot Jimmy Stewart, John Wayne, Walt Disney, Vincent Gallo? Hirsen has his McCarthyite "list of names" on the left, but in order to make his brainless thesis hold water he has to suppress the evidence of his own eyes on the right.

And finally, who are the most prominent people on the book's cover, a couple who clock up a massive five index mentions between them in a book of 314 pages? Why, Bill and Hillary Clinton, of course, the stars of . . . oh, wait. It's all clear now. Hollywood funded and voted, unforgivably, for Clinton - and that, in the eyes of Hirsen and his lamebrained ilk, is what it's really all about. Still, Tales from the Left Coast has a great future in store for itself - hanging on a nail in my lavatory.

--------------------You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity. What one person receives without working for another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for that my dear friend is the beginning of the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it. ~ Adrian Rogers

Quote:wingnutx said:Youonly hate it because the Bush-controlled media brainwashed you that way.

Peanut butter GOOD.

Liberals BAD.

--------------------You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating the wealthy out of prosperity. What one person receives without working for another person must work for without receiving. The government cannot give to anybody anything that the government does not first take from somebody else. When half of the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them and when the other half gets the idea that it does no good to work because somebody else is going to get what they work for that my dear friend is the beginning of the end of any nation. You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it. ~ Adrian Rogers